Can the attempted revivals of past live service games give us a preview of what Concord does next?
“While we determine the best path ahead, Concord sales will cease immediately and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased the game for PS5 or PC,” Concord director Ryan Ellis wrote today, announcing that PlayStation is un-releasing the struggling shooter on September 6 and taking its servers offline. The game has already been removed on Steam, meaning it was available for a total of only 14 days, from its early access launch on August 20 until today, September 3.
So what happens now?
According to Ellis, developer Firewalk Studios and PlayStation will “explore options, including those that will better reach our players.” Does that mean a free-to-play relaunch? A major redesign? Or is it just what you say when you take a game offline?
Here’s how five games have dealt with difficult launches, including two that made successful comebacks and three that didn’t. Their launches may help us gauge how steep a hill Concord has to climb to see daylight again.
Crucible
(Image credit: Amazon)
Released: May 2020
Days online: 42
Revived: Nope
Price: F2P
Peak players: 25,145
Amazon’s Crucible strikes me as the closest analog we’re likely to get to Concord, and not just because I get their names confused constantly. Crucible was a free-to-play third-person hero shooter from a major publisher, yet its launch was enough of a dud for Amazon to announce it was going back into closed beta just five weeks after launch.
The parallels are there in our review: “Crucible seemingly checks all of the boxes needed to fit into the service game climate: a colorful roster of heroes with diverse abilities, cosmetics stuffed to the brim, a battle pass with dozens of progression levels, and snippets of lore that suggest a larger world. Unfortunately, it wraps these familiar elements around a competitive third-person shooter that isn’t very good.”
Crucible’s launch day player numbers were decent, at more than 25,000 concurrents. But clearly almost none of those players stuck around after dabbling in the free game, because there were fewer than 2,000 online simultaneously two weeks later. (That figure was, notably, still triple Concord’s highest player count on Steam). Amazon didn’t immediately give up on Crucible, working on updates and running playtests with its private community of players. But in October it pulled the plug, stating that based on player feedback “ultimately we didn’t see a healthy, sustainable future ahead of Crucible.”
This seems like a probable, though bleak, path for Concord to follow. Without a dramatic reinvention back in larval beta form, it’s hard to imagine a relaunch drawing in enough players to be considered a success.
Anthem
(Image credit: EA)
Released: February 2019
Days online: Still online
Revived: Nope
Price: $20
Peak players: Unknown
Compared to Crucible, BioWare’s Anthem suffered a long, slow death. The launch was not a total disaster, but we saw Anthem as a deeply flawed game, and it was quickly apparent that BioWare was going to struggle with its live service elements. Loot issues and a sparse world left the game on its back foot, and the struggle to fix the game paints a familiar picture. Big updates were delayed to triage more immediate problems, and the new features that trickled out underwhelmed. A year after launch, BioWare said it planned “a longer-term redesign of the experience,” and a year after that, EA declared the revival dead. If Covid-19 hadn’t come in like a wrecking ball, it’s possible Anthem 2.0 could’ve actually made it out into the world.
Anthem was largely considered a failure, and expectations were certainly high for a live service action RPG from EA and BioWare. EA apparently wanted the game to sell six million copies in a month; instead, it sold only five million copies over its life, as of sometime last year. But that’s still vastly more copies than Concord has sold. Analyst estimates peg its sales at just 25,000 copies—even if that figure is way low, it’s hard to look at the gap and see further Concord development as anything but a sunk cost.
MultiVersus
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
Released: July 2022
Days online: 334 days
Revived: Yep
Price: F2P
Peak players: 153,433
MultiVersus is sort of the inverse Crucible. It launched to major interest and more than 100,000 players on Steam back in 2022, but failed to hold onto players long-term. So MultiVersus pivoted, declaring its release had actually just been a beta eight months after release and going dark for a year before relaunching. It was a confusing move considering the game had had two seasons and a tournament at fighting game event Evo, but the move seemed… at least moderately successful? Kinda? The relaunch in May 2024 again attracted a lot of players, and though concurrents have been steadily dropping since then, it seems like MultiVersus may be able to settle into a sustainable place over time.
Then again, publisher Warner Bros. may not be interested in the upkeep of a live service game that isn’t doing mega numbers.
Part of MultiVersus’ relaunch included a new PvE mode, which we enjoyed, but it’s clearly not the main draw for what is primarily a multiplayer game. Adding a feature like that doesn’t seem like a viable path for Concord—the developers couldn’t just whip up an entire FPS campaign in less than a year—and MultiVersus also indicates how hard a F2P audience can be to keep happy. 43% of MultiVersus’ recent reviews are negative, with most of those complaining about either balance or microtransactions and comparing it negatively to the original “open beta.” Simply relaunching Concord for free likely wouldn’t be enough to draw in substantially more players than it had to begin with.
Fortnite
(Image credit: Epic Games)
Released: July 2017
Days online: 63
Revived: Very
Price: F2P
Peak players: 6.1 million
Fortnite is perhaps the oddest, hardest to judge case for a saved game, but it’s probably the most dramatic turnaround in gaming history. Fortnite was actually available in alpha and beta form for 2.5 years before finally hitting early access in 2017, six years after it was first announced. In the meantime, Epic tried and failed to get into the MOBA game with Paragon; when Fortnite arrived, its co-op mode failed to make much of an impression. In just two months, Epic borrowed liberally from the most popular game (and genre) on PC, PUBG, to create Fortnite: Battle Royale, and before long it had eclipsed the most popular game on PC to itself become an unprecedented phenomenon.
Fortnite is proof that a flagging game can absolutely pivot and harness the momentum of moving fast to draw in loads of players. Concord’s marketing wholly failed to distinguish it from other hero shooters players don’t have to pay $40 for right now, and the stink of failure on it may make it very hard for PlayStation to convince anyone to give it a second chance. On the other hand, Concord being pulled from sale has made major waves—countless people now know about it who didn’t before. A dramatic reinvention in the vein of Fortnite is a one-in-a-thousand shot, but people like a comeback story a whole lot more than no story.
Epic’s strength, of course, was that it developed its game engine alongside Fortnite, and had spent years tinkering on a sandboxy game with combat and building that it could quickly remix into a new format. Concord likely couldn’t pull off a change nearly as quickly, and the space it’s competing in is just way more crowded than it was in 2017. If Fortnite’s success was that easy to copy, it wouldn’t still be a juggernaut in 2024.
Artifact
Released: November 2018
Days online: Never delisted
Revived: Attempted
Price: $20
Peak players: 60,646
Concord’s thud of a landing has been hard to process because it’s done so poorly, despite coming from a publisher as big as PlayStation supporting it to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and years of development time. How does that kind of thing happen? Well, just look at Artifact, a card game from Valve, which essentially wrote the book on successful live service games before we even called them that with Team Fortress 2, CS:GO, and Dota 2, and designer Richard Garfield, who made a modestly popular card game called Magic: The Gathering. Valve gathered together a crack team of brilliant minds who designed an overly complex game that fell flat on its face within two months.
“Artifact represents the largest discrepancy between our expectations for how one of our games would be received and the actual outcome,” Valve wrote in March 2019. “But we don’t think that players misunderstand our game, or that they’re playing it wrong. Artifact now represents an opportunity for us to improve our craft and use that knowledge to build better games.” That took a while, but in July 2020 Valve launched a new beta for Artifact 2.0, removing its Steam Marketplace economy to make cards earned via progression instead, condensing the three “lanes” into a single screen, adding a singleplayer campaign, and all-around simplifying the game to be more approachable. While we found this to be a general improvement, a long gestation in closed beta finally ended with Valve canceling development and releasing Artifact to players for free.
It may be cynical, but my takeaway from Artifact—and to a lesser extent, Anthem—is that spending 1-2 years trying to “save” a game that so clearly failed to resonate with players just isn’t worth the time and expense. Of course there are examples we haven’t explored in detail here—after limping for a very long time, Halo Infinite finally got good, though it’s far, far off the peak of popularity the series once enjoyed. Final Fantasy 14 has a famous comeback story, but Square Enix had already had years of success with the combination of Final Fantasy and MMO; the original release never should’ve been such a disaster in the first place. Halo Infinite was similar in a way: it was at least a fundamentally satisfying shooter, but failed to introduce new features and improvements at the pace players expected.
We didn’t feel the same about Concord. That doesn’t mean a comeback is impossible, but PC games that failed after far more encouraging launches point to the harsh reality that it might be for the best to cut Concord loose and try something new.
About Post Author
